The case of Franz Horn and the chronically clenched teeth that are its symptom result, as Walser demonstrates in this bestselling novel [Jenseits der Liebe], from a compounding of pressures: the pressure to succeed in the economic-miracle society (familiar from his Kristlein trilogy) and the psychological pressures—the sense of self-doubt, inferiority and guilt—of failing within that society.

Horn, an average man of forty-four, has spent seventeen years working, suppressing everything else for the success of a denture company. But recently his usefulness to the firm has begun to decline…. Yet even as he now willfully neglects his business obligations, he acquiesces—with almost malicious relish—in his society's values and thus convinces himself of his monstrous worthlessness.

Kafka connoisseur that he is, Walser has Horn reach this conviction via truly Kafkaesque casuistry. Moreover, from the very beginning—strikingly like Gregor Samsa's awakening, with Franz Horn waking...